Song(s) of the Day # 2,704 Eleventh Dream Day

 

Eleventh Dream Day are a group that to those in the know, mean something. The Chicago band, remarkably almost forty years on in terms of their recording career, have yet another album out. Since Grazed their fourteenth in all and first for six years.

Their sound hasn't really changed an enormous amount over the years, they're still something like Neil Young and Crazy Horse sparring with Television, echoes too of Sonic Youth and The Go Betweens but they're definitely older and wiser now and the record reflects this.This is an incredibly mature, assured, fluent and fluid album.

Initially associated, at least loosely, with the Paisley Underground scene, they've done enough since to deserve to be considered in their own space. Their's is the sound very much of a band who set out their stall based very much on the purste deepset love for the sound of electric guitars and their inbuilt redeeming qualities and the sound of male and female voices harmonising together.

These voices are often those of Rick Rizzo and Janet Beveridge Bean the band's founding and core members. To hear their voices coalescing together forty years together and guitars, organs and drums ringing and chiming as their bedrock almost forty years down the line is a quite moving experience, like meeting a couple you met at school decades after you've all left who seem to have made their marriage work despite everything that life has thrown at them.

Because this is a marriage and album that most definitely works in the same way as the latest Teenage Fanclub and Dinosaur Jr. records have worked in recent months and the last Dream Syndicate albums did too. I like the sound of middle aged records, being middle aged myself. There's something hard won and inspiring about their enduring dignity. 

Since Grazed has plenty to say and says it loud and clear over the course of its best part of an hour run  It's a rather steely and admirable album that weds a sense of loss and accrual to splendid effect. It's a resonant and proud record. One to return to.